The Golden Palominos were an American musical group headed by drummer and composer Anton Fier, first formed in 1981. Aside from Fier, the Palominos membership was wildly elastic, with only bassist Bill Laswell and guitarist Nicky Skopelitis appearing on every album.

While the Palominos' records usually featured a core set of musicians and a certain emotional continuity throughout the bulk of an album, various guest appearances would result in stylistic changes from track to track.

Initial lineupThe group first featured Fier, singer-guitarist Arto Lindsay, saxophonist John Zorn, bass guitarist Bill Laswell and violinist/guitarist Fred Frith. Their self-titled debut album was released on New York's Celluloid Records in 1983, and featured guest appearances by bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma, guitarist Nicky Skopelitis, percussionist David Moss, guitarist/singer Bob Kidney, turntablist M.E. Miller and others[1]. The album is notable for having some of the first recorded turntable scratching outside of rap music, courtesy of Laswell and M.E. Miller. M.E.Miller also used vocal splitting technique to create harmony on the song he sings.

They were heavily influenced by so-called no wave music (Arto Lindsay had played in the seminal no-wave band DNA), but their music also contained elements of funk and of the improvisational jazz stylings that would become Zorn's trademark. This line-up lasted only for the first record, although all of the core members apart from Zorn would guest on subsequent Palominos recordings.

1985–1989

The Palominos' next album, 1985's Visions of Excess, would sound vastly different, leaning toward songs in a folk vein, with a sound pre-dating the emergence of the alt-country genre by a few years; However, in a stylistic jump, one song, "The Animal Speaks", featured a pronounced, punk-like electric guitar part and vocals by The Sex Pistols' John Lydon. This record was also noteworthy as the debut of singer Syd Straw[1], whose songwriting and vocals would be featured prominently on this record and the next, Blast of Silence. Cream's Jack Bruce, guitarists Richard Thompson and Jody Harris, and R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe also appeared on the record. Of the band members that were on the first record, only Fier, Laswell and Arto Lindsay had remained.

Blast of Silence was released the following year, continuing in much the same vein as Visions of Excess and with appearances by many of the same personnel. It included covers of two songs written by Little Feat's Lowell George, both sung by Syd Straw. The record also featured prominent guest appearances by Matthew Sweet, Don Dixon, Peter Holsapple and T-Bone Burnett.

A Dead Horse (1989) carried on in the sound of its predecessors slightly, but some of the songs crossed into a darker, more ambient and ethereal sound that would dominate the Palomino records of the 1990s. Syd Straw had moved on and was no longer in the band, with most of the vocals now handled by Amanda Kramer, formerly of the dance music group Information Society. Fier would later guest on Straw's first solo record, Surprise.

1990–1995Drunk With Passion marked the first album not on Celluloid Records, taking cues from some of the darker sounds heard on A Dead Horse and using more processed and electronic sounds, giving some of its songs an ethereal feel. This album is arguably more influenced by its guest appearances than are any of the previous albums. Guests included Hüsker Dü's Bob Mould (who would go on to form the band Sugar the following year), Richard Thompson, and Michael Stipe, who would provide (along with a forceful solo by Thompson) one of the band's finer moments, the opening track "Alive And Living Now". Nicky Skopelitis would also became more of a cornerstone of the band, contributing to the bulk of Drunk With Passion's songs along with Fier and Kramer. In 1992, Fier would release his first solo record, Dreamspeed, which is partially a reworking of the Palomino's next album, This Is How It Feels[1].

This Is How It Feels, released on Restless Records in 1993, continued the ambient sound of Drunk With Passion, but also incorporated elements of club and trance music. It also marked the introduction of new lead vocalist Lori Carson, who co-wrote nine of the CD's tracks with Anton Fier. Bill Laswell also returned to contribute on this record, and his production work on this and on the following record, Pure, would heavily influence Laswell's own remix work of the late 90's, as seen on the CDs Emerald Ather and City Of Light. The album also contains the first cover song since Blast of Silence, an ethereal, drum-machine-laced re-interpretation of Jackson Browne's "These Days". To further highlight the album's dance elements, an EP of remixes of songs from This Is How It Feels , entitled Prison Of The Rhythm, was released shortly after the CD's release...(wiki)